Petition to make "Hella" the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Carl sez, "A petition to make Hella- the official SI prefix for 10^27, for measuring things bigger than Yotta- (the prefix for (US) billion trillion).
For instance: 'the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts.'
It would also come in handy for eventually measuring Internet traffic and US national debt."

It doesn’t matter how you calculate the number of songs ever recorded, since 1 hellabyte would be waaaaaaay bigger than what you would need.

Think of it this way: the total number of people that have ever lived is on the order of 100 billion, or 10^11. Suppose every single person that had ever lived in all of history recorded 1000 songs. That’s 10^14. Suppose every one of those songs was 10 megabytes, or 10^7 bytes. Then the total bytes, if every person that had ever lived in the world recorded 1000 high-fidelity songs, would be 10^21 bytes. That’s still a million times less than the space on one hellabyte drive.

From wikipedia: In 1997, Kleberg County Commissioners unanimously voted to adopt “heaven-o” as the official greeting of the county instead of “hello”.[4] Kleberg County residents are now encouraged to use “heaven-o” to acknowledge one another. The reason cited for the change was the fact that hello contains the word hell, even though there is no etymological connection.

Kingsville resident Leonso Canales Jr. has been inundated with telephone calls since he successfully lobbied Kleberg County commissioners last month to designate ”heaveno” as the county’s official greeting.

…I could see Gwen Stefani trying to sue over this, claiming this movement was infringing on one of her songs. Remember, this is the same bimbo who had her attorneys look into suing all those Harajuku girls who were dressing up like her because she didn’t have clue one what that whole cosplay scene was all about.

Hi.
That’s a cute and spirited idea, but I wonder if that would cheapen the context of something like the national dept, or other negatives, and leave a less than impactful impression, giving people one more reason to get back to their lattes and SUV’s.

I think it could be great. “Hellatons” and “hellawatts” actually sound very scientific and professional already. (I would have made their first example in the petition “hellaatoms” — that one just sounds dumb.

They didn’t mention what 10^-27 would be in their petition. I have to agree with the commentor above that, to keep with standards, it would have to be “hello-” as in “hellowatts.” That’s a little unfortunate, but not too bad.

Signing.

@GuidoDavid: If you read the petition, you’ll see that “hella” is California surfer slang for “very” or “lots,” as in “that’s hella big” or (from the petition) “there are hella stars out tonight.“

Ok friends… ‘hella’ may have been cool 15 years ago, but it is still quite mainstream in many circles (read: California), even if it is less of a trend. The fact that it originated a while time ago just means that it has become embedded in the vernacular of a larger span of ages. And, why not? After all, ‘hella’ DOES mean a lot.